Sitting and watching and zoning and spacing

Being at home sick for four days has offered me a chance to catch up with my good friend Television. Like catching up with any friend you haven't seen in a while and always had a somewhat strained relationship with, you first wonder why it's been so long since you last spent this much quality time together, but after a while, you're ready to do just about anything else, and you realize exactly why it's been so long.

In the pointless spirit of full disclosure, here are some of the things my TV's pixels have showed me since Thursday, presented to you in a length that will ensure that no one will read the whole thing:

Hustle and Flow (on demand)
This was a weird one: I started watching this movie on Saturday night and was really not liking it at all. It was slow, and the characters seemed like caricatures. But I had paid for it, and if I have to give money to those thieving bastards at Comcast, I better get my money's worth, so I started it back up on Sunday morning...and really liked the rest of it. It was predictable and had all the flaws of so many indie movies, but I had that full-of-good-film feeling when it was over. It seems completely wrong to say, but Hustle and Flow is a great Sunday morning movie.

Jurassic Park (most of)
After I'd been watching it for a while, I had to double-check the listing for the year it came out. I couldn't believe it was 1993, not just because I remember it coming out all too well, but there wasn't much about the production that was dated. The special effects still look really good and the film quality is fresher than you would think of a 13-year-old film. Besides the fact that it was when Spielberg was still making films that were just "thrilling" instead of "disturbing", it was fairly hard to believe that it was released it's as old as it is.

...except for the clothes. Now, maybe there was a deliberate attempt to make them look like the science nerds they all were, but the clothes looked subtley but decidedly dated. For one, the waistline of Laura Dern's jeans were about halfway up her torso. The men's shorts redefined "short", threatening to dangle a nut at any second. I'm not the most fashionable guy in the world, but even I could notice some pretty important improvements we've made since then.

Disc Two of Ken Burns' Jazz
I'm turning into a regular Ken Burns junkie. It takes a good amount of perserverence to make it all the way through some of his stuff, but it's always worth it. Buffs of whatever subject he takes on always complain that he doesn't go deep enough, or that he glorifies things, but God, let the man glorify. There's not a single one of his docs where some tears haven't welled for me at several points during.

Jazz is amazing, even though I'm only two-of-ten into it. I love Wynton Marsalis's explanations of the musical structure, and listening to the slow evolution of the sound, but one of the things that struck me most (and this deserves a long post on its own) was the piece on the Austin High Gang, a group of white kids from surburban Chicago in the early '20's who fell in love with the sounds coming from downtown, in spite of the social divides that almost everyone had set up for them. It reminded me that regardless of who creates a kind of music, who listens to it, and who it's meant for, there are people from any place and any circumstance--even from boring whitebread suburbs--who will be able to appreciate the excitement of it.

Forrest Gump (partial)
I can't believe that I loved this movie when it came out. I guess it still has a nice "the goodness of people" value to it, but Tom Hanks' (who I usually like a lot, not a little because people think I look kind of like him) performance is ridiculous. Making him a little slow is part of the act, I guess, but the voice he puts on is a joke. Maybe it's a joke because so many jokes have been made of it, but I couldn't take this movie for longer than about ten minutes.

Hulk (partial attention paid)
Apparently, there are some extremely important plot points made in the first five minutes of this movie, because having missed those, absolutely nothing else in the film made anything resembling sense, so I quit paying attention except when Jennifer Connelly was on screen. This film has almost resurrected my high-school crush on J.C. She looks absolutely stunning in this movie, enough to remind me why I collected pictures of her almost two decades ago. She's prettily paired with Eric Bana to make a romantic couple that's all too beautiful, though kind of creepy in that they-look-related way.

The quality of the movie is what you've heard: It's rotten, partly because it doesn't make any goddamn sense, but mostly because the computer animated Hulk is ridiculous. Every time the hulk shows up, I'd first think, "Wait, am I watching Shrek?" which would then fade to, "He's three times the size of Bruce Banner, but somehow still fits into his pants?!"

Star Wars: The Return of The Sith (on demand)
I feel pretty much the same about it as I did the first time I saw it, but it's a pretty great way to kill three hours when you're sick. I would imagine it's also fun to watch with any smart-ass friends¹ you might have, because there's endless amounts of jokes to be made during it.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
This is another one that deserves a long post of it's own. The basic review goes like this: It's a fascinating subject, and worth watching for that alone, but it's one of the worst-made documentaries I've seen in a long time. It's badly organized, and the stock footage that they use is just this side of your local news: cheesy, distracting images of things like a sack with a dollar sign printed on it falling in slow motion, an old black-and-white film clip of a magician when they talk about the accounting "magic", and worst of all, when they discuss the company's "free-fall", the audio is imposed over a shot of some goofy guy skydiving off a cliff. Ridiculous.

But again, the content makes it worthwhile watching. I found myself, though, not really being surprised by it. The entire Enron scandal seemed inevitable. It's a product of the obsession with profits that naturally comes with deregulated capitalism and the common (read: universal) business idea that, "{shrug} Business is business. You have to make money. Period." I liked that the reporter who wrote the initial article pointed out that these were not necessarily evil men: they just became so obsessed with profit that they didn't stop to worry about whether it actually worked out right.

The other thought that I had while watching the movie was that this problem with reporting profits with nothing to back me up seems to me to be confusingly to me like so many other accepted economic parts of our lives. People buy houses that they can't afford. The post 9/11 economy was largely kept afloat by "consumer spending", so in other words, people were spending money they didn't really have. Besides the fact that the Enron execs were spending OPP (other people's pensions), I was as confused by the Enron crimes as I am by so many other parts of the financial world of the US.

In other words, I don't really know what I'm talking about. So I'll end it here.

¹ Please note that ALL of my friends are smart-asses. It's one of the qualities I admire most.